It can go one of a few ways.
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Apart from the few subs that remain offline, it’ll basically be back to normal. Those that do remain offline indefinitely just get forcibly reopened or recreated by admins, especially huge subreddits like /r/videos. Smaller ones just get redicted to /r/topicnew or some other creative name.
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A lot of subreddits and more importantly moderators and users leave the site permanently. In order for this to happen however, there’d have to be a consensus alternative, which there isn’t ATM. Otherwise, these communities are pretty much lost forever unless the mods put a message to go to X alternative service in the “subreddit is private” banner. Tbh, I don’t think people are gonna stomach losing years of their lives in an instant so they’ll just re create subreddits unless the mods provide an alternative.
No matter what though, they’re not backing down on the effective removal of the API (still leaving the sneaky clause “you can pay us if you want but it’ll be a king’s ransom” for AI, even though they can just trawl the web manually lol). They’ll probably announce some crappy customization features to hoodwink those who don’t know what an API is and lie to them and say it’s “API v2” or whatever.
I just honestly don’t know how it’s going to shake out and I’m scared im going to lose these communities. I don’t give a single solitary fuck about Reddit the company anymore, and I never did really. I just hope all of the subreddits find a new home and don’t just shrug their shoulders and say “welp, guess that’s it guys”.
In my view this isn’t the end of Reddit, but it is the beginning of the end. This situation will probably pass, but the lemmy devs and instance owners have already gotten useful feedback about how to handle situations like this, and what kinds of things would help lemmy and the fediverse grow. The next time something like this happens (and there will be a next time) they’ll be just that little bit more ready.
Although for me specifically, I don’t actually care too much if Reddit dies. I’m happy as long as there’s a community here. The best thing that seems to be coming out of this situation so far is that many subreddits are now getting lemmy community analogs for people to move to.
I want reddit to die. It had its day, and what we have now is a poor reflection on what it was and what it’s supposed to be. Change is a good thing, it leads to improvement and making things better.